Macy's Becoming a Homeless Shelter Is 'Good News'?

The Times has started running a regular feature headlined "The Week in Good News."

This week's installment appears with the introduction, "Sometimes it seems as if we're living under a constant barrage of heavy news. But it isn't all bad out there. This feature is meant to send you into the weekend with a smile, or at least a lighter heart....Here are seven great things we wrote about this week."

One of these "great things" or "good news" meant "to send you into the weekend with a smile" was a Times article about a Macy's at an Alexandria, Va. shopping mall that has been partly converted to a temporary homeless shelter.

I guess it's possible to interpret the fact that the homeless are being sheltered rather than ignored as "good news," but the story itself is so bleak that it's more likely to evoke tears than smiles:

Landmark's original anchor stores either have been bought out, went bankrupt or are clinging to life — like many in the retail business. Last year, 6,985 stores closed in the United States, a record number, according to Coresight Research, a retail analysis and advisory firm. This year, retailers are on a pace to close roughly 10,000 stores.

In its final years of operation, the Landmark's tenants included two dollar stores and a tax preparer. Only the Sears is still operating. A lone, blue inflatable figure dances on the store's roof, beckoning shoppers.

There had been plans to revamp the mall by returning it to its roots as an open-air shopping destination. But that proposal never got off the ground, after its former owner General Growth Properties filed for bankruptcy in 2009, and the mall was sold....

Jahlil and his two brothers are sharing a windowless room at the shelter after their mother fell behind on rent....

As Ms. Smith waited to move into her new room, the electricity cut out to a portion of the shelter and the staff set up battery powered camping lanterns to light the way for movers....

The accommodations are sparse and some residents could not hide their disappointment that the bedrooms do not have windows.

We're supposed to smile? At the news that what used to be a prosperous shopping mall that generated sales-tax revenue and provided lots of jobs is now mostly abandoned except for a homeless shelter that provides windowless rooms and unreliable electricity to people who, even in a low-unemployment economy, can't afford to put a roof over their own heads?

I get the instinct of the Times to want to identify some "good news" stories to attract readers who find the news in general to be so grim that they'd rather tune it out. But this one really seemed to me like a stretch, or scraping the bottom of the barrel, or proof that the Times would generally do better if it stuck to just delivering the news rather than characterizing it as "good" or "bad" or advising readers on whether to greet that news with a smile or with a frown.

If the Times editors can't understand this point, they might consider a thought experiment: Would it count as "good news" if the Washington bureau and Jerusalem bureau of the New York Times were abandoned because of the financial pressure faced by the newspaper, and if those office spaces were partially repurposed as homeless shelters?

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